[mattnguyen]

My older sibling and I both grew up in a single-parent household. Since we were tight on money, my sister decided to go to community college after high school in part to look after me while our parent worked. After two years, my sibling transferred with a full ride to a good university.

Looking to my sibling's experience, I decided to leave high school when I turned 16 to attend community college and accrue transfer credits. 2.5 years later, I transferred to a good university and graduated earlier than my high school peers, saving tens of thousands of dollars. I had a blast during this time, as it really helped shape my most formative years of development, especially being exposed to so many diverse groups (as you would expect at a community college).

Now my other younger family members are looking to my experiences and deciding for themselves if the last two years of high school or first two years of university education are important to them. Now they are taking the community college route to save money, and they seem to understand that they can still derive meaningful experiences and relationships.

[maxerickson]

Having a year (or more) of college credits upon high school graduation should be one of the education tracks available to every student.

It's a massive failure of imagination that this isn't already the case.

[gscott]

The local 2 year college nearby created a Charter High School for grades 11-12 where there High School students take college classes to count for both college and high school. It was good for my son who graduated a few years ago. More 2 year colleges might have similar programs I am not sure http://middlecollege.guhsd.net/

[wil421]

Why should you have to get credits before you leave High School? Just teach more advanced subjects in both High School and College.

I agree with what you are saying but I think it’s a product of a failure somewhere else in the education system. No child left behind and other programs hinder education by applying one size fits all policies.

[oculusthrift]

This is essentially what AP classes are, is it not. If you go to a decent high school and take a good amount of AP’s it will keep you busy and challenged.

[bsder]

It's called Advanced Placement.

You can rack up quite a lot of credits with AP courses.

As an engineer, I wiped out all my English requirements (6 credits). I wiped out Chemistry (6 credits and a really annoying lab at 4 credits). And I wiped out my first Calc class (4 credits). I think I killed a foreign language requirement, too (probably 6 credits).

That's 30 credits--or, a full year.

The big problem was that I was feeding into engineering which really doesn't let you wipe a lot out--knocking off Chemistry was a big deal (I also had an AP History score which didn't do anything for me, for example). Generally, all your good science scores just let you switch to a "more researchy" track where you take "deeper theoretical" (read: a shitton more work) classes.

[epage]

I've seen this in some cities and love it. I unfortunately had a district that was targeted at the lowest common denominator. My high school would only consider accepting community college credits if you were in danger of not graduating. I was a dual-enrollment student (HS+CC) and took Calc 1-3 + DiffEq, Kinetics, E&M, and more while still taking the filler courses at my high school.